How Stash Used A/B Testing to Increase User Engagement by 12%

Thu Phan

Jan 24, 2019

The Customer

Stash is a personal finance and investment app that makes investing more accessible to the masses by letting people start investing with as little as $5. The app helps investors (or as they like to call Stashers) save and invest for the long term and to develop smarter financial habits by offering coaching advice, financial and investment tips and built-in tools to automate the investing experience.

The Challenge

Stash was looking to reduce churn and increase overall user engagement. The Auto-Stash feature allowed investors to automatically schedule their investments but there were instances where investors would disable the feature if the markets were down. The product team at Stash decided to completely re-design the feature.

Hypothesis

By clearly displaying the amount of each investment in a Stasher’s portfolio, rather than just the aggregate total value of their portfolio, they would be more likely to keep their Auto-Stash Set Schedule turned on for their investments.

The A/B Test

Stash ran an A/B test on a new design of the Auto-Stash feature that showed individual investment amounts. The control was the current version of the Auto-Stash feature showing the aggregate total of a user’s portfolio.

The Results

The variant that showed the amount of each investment in a user’s portfolio along with the total aggregate value of their portfolio caused 12% more Stashers to keep automatically saving even 8 months later.

Takeaway

The investment app was always looking for ways to make the app simpler for their clients. But this test showed them that sometimes Stashers want to be able to see more details about the investments they’re buying every week, not just the total amount.

The experiment resolved questions about how they display information about investments to Stashers.

“According to reports, the average American does not have $400 in savings for a medical or family emergency. We were able to get thousands more people to develop good financial habits by putting money away on a regular basis in savings and investments with a simple redesign, and Apptimize’s technology was central to that outcome.”

Andre Borczuk Lead Product Manager, STASH

Disclosure: Investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments LLC, an SEC registered investment adviser. This information is for educational purposes only, and is not intended as investment, legal, accounting or tax advice. Images of account holdings and performance are hypothetical and are provided for information purposes only.

More articles you might be interested in:

How to Increase App Upgrade Revenue with A/B Testing

ChordShaker, an iOS app that makes learning guitar chords easy and fun, increased their revenue from upgrades by 20.1% with an A/B test of a simple copy change. With Apptimize, this change took only a few minutes to set up...

4 Things to A/B Test to Increase App Engagement

In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of app engagement and the top engagement metrics that you should be tracking in your app. Now that we’ve discussed what to track, let’s talk about how to increase those numbers....

App Engagement: Engagement Metrics and Some Industry Stats

When talking about app optimization, we often hear mobile experts talk about “engagement.” But what exactly is engagement? How do most app managers define engagement and what are some ways to improve engagement? In this post, I’ll go through some...

Schedule A Customized Demo

Get in touch with us for a detailed walk-through of Apptimize.

About Apptimize

Apptimize empowers product teams to efficiently run A/B tests, rollout and manage new features, and deliver personalized user experiences. Based in San Francisco, Apptimize is backed by US Venture Partners, Google Ventures, Y Combinator, and others.